‘Hacks’ Showrunner Teases Meaning Behind Deborah’s Coyote Encounter

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Hacks Season 4, Episode 2, “Cover Girls.”]

Hacks Season 4 is finally here, and it’s serving up some serious symbolism in its second episode, “Cover Girls,” which sees Deborah (Jean Smart) dream of a coyote sneaking into her room at night, only to awaken to howls from the animals nearby.

Reaching out to her beloved corgis, she settles back to sleep with her pets but the next morning is faced with the ugly reality of having such predators roaming around her property’s perimeter when she nearly steps on entrails that are left behind on her welcome mat.

In the season premiere episode, the relationship between Deborah and her protege, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), has been fractured seemingly beyond repair after the young comedian blackmailed her way into being the show’s head writer. While their joint managers, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter), mediate to keep things as close to civil as possible, Ava and Deborah are pretty much at each other’s throats amid their rise to the late-night TV stage. Adding in Marcus’ (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) exit from Deborah’s team, and it’s clear she’s feeling rather abandoned.

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And according to cocreator Jen Statsky, that’s part of the inspiration behind this coyote motif viewers are seeing unfold in Episode 2. “Well, it’s a little bit like ripped from the headlines because when you live in LA, you do deal with hearing coyote attacks quite often at night, and it’s very jarring, and Paul [W. Downs] and Lucia [Aniello], specifically, are dealing with a massive coyote problem,” Statsky says of her fellow cocreators and showrunners.

“We just felt like [for] Deborah out of her element, out of Las Vegas, in this new place that she isn’t as familiar with and dealing with all these pressures, the coyotes,” Statsky teases, are “a manifestation of all of what she believes are the people coming from her, all of the pressures coming from her, Ava and Winnie Landell [Helen Hunt], and all of these things descending upon her, that she’s dealing with and that is causing her stress and anxiety and the mounting pressure she’s feeling.”

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Deborah sees the animal again, but in real life while driving home after a fateful meal with boss Winnie, who conveyed that Deborah and Ava need to deliver the best late-night show on TV right now, which means that the women need to put their differences aside if they want to get the job done.

Putting a late-night show together with a head writer you don’t get along with would stress anyone out, even the seemingly infallible Deborah Vance. Stay tuned to see how the coyotes might continue as a Season 4 motif, and let us know what you think of their symbolism in the comments section below.

Hacks, Season 4, New Episodes, Thursdays, Max